Seventeen

My dad had given me some old luggage, but I couldn't find it anywhere. All my clothing fit into two pillowcases and a cardboard box, but there wouldn't be room for the books. From the stack along a bedroom wall, I chose Rabbit Run by John Updike, The Great Gatsby and Hemingway's In Our Time.

It was eight in the morning, and the day was beautiful. Sunlight cut deeply into the apartment and found me standing at my bedroom door. I'd slept only briefly, wearing the clothes I'd come home in. That sweet odor of gasoline and flowers was me. I went to the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, stepped into the shower, and turned it on full-blast.

After dressing in some fresh jeans and a white t-shirt, I went to the refrigerator. There was nothing in it but an empty milk carton, a dozen bright apples, and two tired-looking potatoes that had slowly grown eyes. I took two apples and stuffed them into one of the pillowcases.

I made a smooth exit without any awkward good-byes. Randy and Penelope were probably in one of their bedrooms, sleeping off their astonishment at having paired off. Wherever Dave the Poet was, he was probably dreaming about doors.

At the bottom of the front stairs, Gus and Larry, the giant neighbors, were in warm-up outfits that said "Temple University" across the front. Gus was wearing roller skates and making surprisingly graceful figure eights on the sidewalk. Larry was jogging in place.

"Leaving town?" said Larry jerkily.

"Yeah."

"Anyplace special, like Aruba?"

"Just Kansas," I said, "to see my parents."

"See you later," said Gus, executing a brilliant backward leap and turn on his skates. he landed so softly, you could barely hear the skates click on the sidewalk. All of his great height seemed to unwind and regather during the maneuver.

"So long!" I said, but they were already moving away.

I drove to the Metropolitan, parked the car in front, and left the keys inside. If somebody stole it, I wouldn't go anywhere. If it was waiting when I returned, the fates had decided.

The Hospital was bright and busy. Patients were being wheeled off to tests and surgery. Volunteers and candy stripers walked here and there, carrying out the useless tasks to which they were fairly accustomed, their very inefficiency a sign that somebody cared.

Janush's secretary, Becky, was in the office, but he wasn't, which both pleased and disappointed me. On the one hand, I wanted to get even with him, as Dan Howes had done when Gary fired him a few months ago. In anger, Dan swept everything off Gary's desk, including the prized pictures of his family. On the other hand, I didn't want the aggravation of seeing him again. Becky was on the phone with her husband, so I pointed to my paycheck, which was on the desk under an open one-pound bag of M&Ms in front of her. All the paychecks were there, since that was the routine every other Friday. I picked it up and waved good-bye with it as I headed back down the hall. Neither of us spoke a word. In the elevator, I opened the envelope and there was a letter of termination inside, signed by Bolger. Having no use for the letter, I handed it to a kid from Pediatrics who was being wheeled down for an X ray or test. He gave me a smile and tucked it into the Mickey Mouse coloring book he had on his lap. He would draw on it later. The other people in the elevator -- an intern, a dietician, and Robert Sage -- smiled mechanically and looked up at the floor numbers blinking over their heads.

The car was where I had left it, keys in the ignition. I started the engine and steered dreamily to the Hancock Building, which soared to a point overhead. The doorman at the side entrance on Delaware Street didn't challenge my parking there, even though the 1963 Chevy Nova had rust spots around the door and gave off blue smoke. In fact, he held the door for me, and I entered the lobby regally.

The Lake Shore National Bank was on the second floor. I cashed the paycheck, which amounted to $230. Then I wrote a check for the balance of the account: $189.10. The teller had to check with the manager, but after a while she handed me the cash with a look of commiseration, as if she wanted to go somewhere, too.

The doorman opened the car door, which squeaked on its hinges. I offered him a dollar from the bank envelope I'd stuffed my money into, but inexplicably he refused it, tipping his hat and smiling. It was so nice of him, I waved good-bye as I made an illegal U-turn in the direction of Lake Shore Drive, leaving behind a dozen honking horns from the cars I nearly hit. All the lights were timed in my favor. Soon I was part of the high-speed traffic flowing out of the city as if fleeing a storm or god. All around me, people had two hands locked on the wheel, their eyes straight ahead, intent on where they were going rather than on where they had been.

The car wasn't prepared for any kind of trip. It was hardly ready to go around the block. A blue pigtail of smoke trailed behind, and the engine could be heard roaring through a hole in the floor, which was covered with a cheap rubber mat. Even with the pedal floored, the engine compression was so bad that the car could only do fifty miles an hour. It was all my fault. I'd never learned the least rudiments of car care. You were supposed to change the oil every few thousand miles, but I couldn't imagine going to all the bother. As a result, I'd gone through a few used cars in pretty quick succession, as if they were designed to be thrown away. The old Chevy Nova was about to go under, too. When I got to the freeway, I removed the rubber mat covering the hole in the floor and watched the road fly under my feet. This was a lot of fun on a country road when no traffic was coming. The idea was to straddle the middle of the road so the white line flashed across your vision like a blinking light.

It took about a half a day or more to get to Plevna, Kansas. My parents lived about two miles south of town.

My mother, Mary, was in the yard poking at the ground with a stick when I pulled up. She seemed not to recognize me at first, squinting and staring. She always was slow to acknowledge people anyway, as if she were thinking about something else.

"Hi, Mom!" I shouted as the car got close enough.

"Oh, Jim," she said, squinting with confusion. "What are you doing here?"

"This is where I live, remember? What are you doing with that stick?"

"Testing the ground," she said, "to see if anything will grow here." She always had an enormous garden, from which we were fed from July until the first frost. Over the years it had gotten so large that it surrounded the white frame house almost entirely, except for a shady part near the outside cellar door where nothing would grow. It didn't seem odd to me that it was about eleven in the evening and my mother was out in the yard with a stick and a flashlight.

As with most country homes, no one entered through the front door. Even the Bible salesmen came to the kitchen door in back.

I got out of the car and gave mom a kiss on the cheek?

"Where's Dad?"

"In the house," she said, pointing with her stick, even though it was only a few feet away. For a moment, I thought I saw my father's dark round face at the window, like a figure in a gothic novel. He preferred the indoors, where he sat reading the TV Guide although we only got two channels and we never turned the set on anyway. It was mother who seemed more comfortable outside, in spite of a pale complexion that caused her to burn easily.

"You go on inside," she said, returning to her agriculture, "I'll be along in a minute." As I carried my belongings to the door, I watched her poking at the ground with great concentration. She had always been the pioneer woman, and the developing age of suburban ease was foreign to her character. One day she opened a kitchen cabinet and a mouse, made frantic by its discovery, leaped out at her. She batted it down with one hand, watched it scramble along the counter and fall into the wastebasket. Then she calmly bent down and smashed the animal with her hands, the only available weapons. At nine years of age, I was more impressed than you could possibly imagine.

My dad sat in the living room, reading the Guide. He looked up the way someone looks up in a library, with a pleasant, abstracted smile on his face. He was half in the magazine and half out of it.

"Oh, hello, Jim," he said, as if I'd just come back from an errand. "I saw you come up the drive through the window there. Why didn't you tell us you were coming?"

"I left on the spur of the moment," I said.

"You're not in any kind of trouble, I hope." His face clouded over.

"No trouble. I haven't been home in a while, and it seemed a good time to come."

"Well, we're glad to see you," he said, glancing at his magazine as if I'd already left.

I sat at te center of the sofa, the cardboard box and pillowcases at my feet.

"What you got there?" he asked.

"Oh, just some clothes."

"Why don't you use that nice Samsonite luggage we got from Mother?"

"This seemed easier," I said.

His eyeglasses flashed window light in my eyes. Mother was his mother, Earnestine Summers Holder, and she had a room upstairs. She was eighty-two years old, but she'd nearly lost her vision from a fall and her speech was impaired by a stroke. She had been visiting some relatives in Iowa, and one night they were sitting on the back porch, eavesdropping on the neighbors. Leaning to hear better, she'd lost the edge of the chair and landed hard. The jolt had shaken loose pieces of her retina. Because they were opaque, she could see only a small part of anything, like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

"How's the car running?" he asked, looking up from his reading.

"Oh, great. Just great."

"Thought I saw some smoke coming out of its tail."

"Needs a tune-up, that's all."

"If you take care of a car, it will take care of you. Dad used to say that. You getting good gas mileage?"

"Oh, sure," I said, but I was thinking how funny the conversation was. I'd been at country get-togethers where nothing was discussed but gas mileage.

"You should say hello to Mother," he said.

"I will."

We sat in silence then. My body felt heavy, my eyes weighted down; my feet were sinking through the floor. I leaned over, put my head on the couch, and entered a deep, profound and useful sleep. This was what I always did when I came home for a visit. When I woke up, my dad was shaking my shoulder gently and the dinner table was set. I had slept almost twenty hours on the couch. My belongings were gone, except for the two apples, which were on the coffee table. In my drowsiness, I looked twice at them, confused. I knew instantly that my mother had washed and ironed my clothes, what there was of them.

We went into dinner and ate mostly in silence, as usual. Every now and then, Dad would say something like "The weather today was really something" without having a real point. He felt something had to be said in order to make a meal pleasant. The only thing mother said was "Richard, don't eat so fast," because she wanted him to lose weight. I said nothing at all. In this way, we finished our meal of pot roast and mashed potatoes, which was the best I'd ever eaten.

After the dishes were done, we went back into the front room and turned on the TV. By now it was getting dark outside, but they didn't turn on a lamp in order to save on electricity. We sat bathed in the blue-and-violet light of "Bowling for Dollars," their favorite show. They were never more animated than when this show was on, and the host, Sammy Speaks, delighted them. The format was pretty simple. Sammy would briefly interview people, then they would try to get two strikes in a row. If they were successful, they got the money that had built up in the pot, which was now at $350. If they got one stike and a spare, they got a Ping-Pong paddle or something. Sammy always asked guests the same question, "What do you like to eat?" They acted like it was a tough question and screwed up their faces in intense concentration. Yes, that's right, it's coming to me now -- I like spaghetti, or steak, or fried chicken! Everyone in the studio audience would laugh warmly and sympathetically, because they liked those dishes too. I felt an overwhelming affection for my parents as they enjoyed their television show.

"Bowling for Dollars" was over, and since no one had won the big pot, it went up to four hundred dollars. Then the evening news came on, and Walter Cronkite announced in his avuncular fashion, laden with tragedy and importance, that a major bombing raid had been carried out in Cambodia, as ordered by President Richard Nixon. Many of the enemy had no doubt lost their lives, but what was the cost in terms of foreign policy? The NATO allies were in disagreement. How far would the U. S. go to turn the tide of the war? It was announced that momentarily the president would speak from the Oval Office, explaining his decision.

Nixon appeared, his entire being neurotic, like a failed high school principal. He seemed always on the verge of crying or breaking something on his desk. Whenever he was on the air, I had to check the air above him for wires, since his erratic head and arm movements suggested puppetry.

I thought back to Lyndon Johnson's announcement, in the spring of 1968, that he would not seek reelection. Those of us who watched the speech on television in the student union were nearly dizzy with glee and amazement, and we leaped around, hugging each other. But the war dragged on anyway, and Terry Grubbs went and got killed in it.

Earlier in the war, Walter Cronkite had gone on the air with similar gravity in his voice. Some Viet Cong commandos on a suicide mission had invaded the U. S. embassy compound in Saigon and destroyed much of the facility before they were killed. The last commando had been tracked down in the hallways of the compound by an assistant undersecretary of something or other, who'd been handed a pistol through a broken window. The small bodies of the dead commandos, wearing civilian clothes, were laid out in a neat row on a perfectly groomed grass of the embassy. Soldiers and bureaucrats stood around in their crew cuts and tans and looked worried, as if the frail bodies might leap to their feet and start fighting again. The tone of Cronkite's voice expressed what everyone already knew, that this war was going to be different. Everybody was going to get hurt this time. The war was outside the door right now, breathing the night air of central Kansas.

While Nixon talked, my dad's face screwed up with emotion. As a member of the Church of Peace, he despised Nixon's policies, but his respect for the office itself drove him nearly to tears. It was too much. I excused myself, went out to the car, and drove fifteen miles through the summer darkness to Sterling, the small town where Terry Grubbs's family lived. Along the way I passed through unincorporated villages consisting of a mom-and-pop store with a gas pump in front. They had names like Pride, Avarice, and Kindness.

I found the Grubbs' house easily enough, since there were only eight houses in the whole town. Besides, the windows were ablaze with light, in contrast with the dimness of the surrounding properities. Slashes of light fell onto the ground, as if from a spaceship. There were no curtains. You could see everything inside very clearly, as if lighted for a theatrical performance. I had turned off the lights of the car when I rounded the corner, so I sat in darkness, the engine noisily idling, watching Mr. and Mrs. Grubbs stand in the living room. He wore dark green work clothes and held a can of beer in his right hand. She wore a bright green apron and what looked like a wig, the color of orangutan fur. She also held a frying pan at waist level, as if she'd just left the stove. Neither moved an inch.

I felt a little guilty watching them, as if they were the Grubbs and not wax models. They were absorbed in something I couldn't see, perhaps the Nixon speech on television. It was also possible they'd gone catatonic, but then Russell Grubbs was always crazy. On Halloween he would lie on his yard under a blanket, wearing commando gear and waiting for kids to soap his windows. If some poor kid so much as stepped on the property, he was on his feet like a demon, chasing him with a club. As a result, people went out of their way to vandalize whatever he had, lobbing paint balloons from passing cars. His high-speed pickup truck, with rifle rack and CB antenna, was parked in the yard, facing the road and looking lethal.

The longer I watched, the creepier I felt, as if I'd entered Russell Grubbs's state of mind. He was reduced to a statue of himself in his living room, and I had become the paranoid watcher. My gaze carried along the side of the house like a spotlight, licking the point, teetering along the edge of a window, making the spidery figure of a bullet hole in the pane of glass framing Russell Grubbs's skull. What if he turned and saw me? In my immobility, I was prey. It was as if we had entered a dome of blue light, American icons in fixed positions.

I eased the car past the neighboring houses and out of town. As soon as I thought Terry's father couldn't see, I turned the lights back on and crossed the stream south of town. Every now and then I would look in the rearview mirror to see if his truck was following, but the only lights were those from farms. When I started to feel better, I reached below the seat and got a beer out and put it between my legs. In a mile or so, it was already empty.

The Calvary Holiness Chapel was an old brick country church the Pentecostal Holiness congregation had bought from some failed Presbyterians. They'd removed the stained-glass windows and put in plain glass, since decoration was next to sin. Every Sunday morning and Wednesday night, they rolled on the floor, shook tambourines, and spoke in tongues of fire, but they wanted an austere building in which to practice these things. They had also inherited the Presbyterian dead, who were interred in the cemetery on the rise behind the church. I figured this was where Terry would be, if he was anywhere in the world.

I drove the car through the gravel parking lot and up the hill into the cemetery as far as I could go without knocking down a stone. Then I put the lights on high beam and started walking toward the far end of the cemetery, where the new graves were probably located. The car lights made my shadow enormous against the hill, so that walking became a grotesque kind of dance. My shadow's head disappeared into the darkness above the cemetery.

Terry's grave had to be the one with the small American flag provided by the local American Legion. I knelt by the stone, which was small and flat to the ground, and ran my hand over the lettering. Memories shivered through me. I thought of Terry the night he threw the steering wheel hard with one hand, like he wanted to send us into the trees. The car went into a controlled wobble from one side of the road to the other, and an oncoming car pulled onto the shoulder, the driver's eyes as big as tires. Another time, Terry grabbed the steering wheel while I was driving, forcing the car off the road and across someone's lawn. He was so strong I couldn't fight him off, and he laughed like crazy. I saw him climb to the top of a small country bridge and step casually off, his huge body an absurdity in midair, landing in the deepest part of creek water.

Someone had left flowers in a glass tube beside the neighboring grave, which was that of a little child. A teddy bear leaned against the stone, but it wasn't yet weatered, as if someone had left it there that afternoon. I pulled the glass tube out of the ground and transferred it to Terry's grave. Then I stepped back and stood for a while in respectful silence. The wind came up and jerked the little American flag on his grave to momentary attention. It was all very peaceful and sad, but everything was also made strange by the car lights. Even the grass was menacing and larger than life. I shuddered because I imagined Terry lying in his casket, mouth open like a lady's purse.

All of a sudden I felt all the beers I drank on the way to Kansas and that day. I had a feeling I was going to throw up, but I somehow knew I didn't have it in me. I was shaking pretty badly as I walked to the car and got another can of beer.

The beer tasted horrible. My jaw tightened as it went down my throat. It seemed to just drop into my stomach. It usually spirals down my throat, past my chest warming me as it slowly lifts me to a happy sleep with heavy eyelids.

I was so angry, I felt I had to cry. I threw the can down and saw some white rocks at the top edge of a little embankment on the edge of the cemetary lit up by the car headlights. For some reason I walked over to the pile and looked at the rocks. I was thinking, what am I doing? What am I doing? I got in my car, drove here, and what am I doing? Eight hundred miles and what am I doing?

After a moment I grew calm and quit shaking. I felt the presence of the church behind me. I bent down and picked up one of the white stones. Like a game of dominos, several other stones fell down the embankment one after another. One stone causing two stones causing four stones and so on down to the bottom.

The rock I had in my hands was smooth and weighed about three pounds. I could still feel the day's collected warmth in the stone.

I remember that I shook my head no, but I was smiling. I turned around and saw that empty building black against the night sky. The stars above the roof were just staring blankly at no one. It was so quiet the wind didn't even make a sound in the cottonwood trees that surrounded the cemetary and churchyard.

I threw the stone at the building. It landed about ten feet from the base of the bricked wall. I picked up another stone and flung it harder. I felt a pop in my elbow and the stone landed short about two feet. I hurt my arm, but I thought if I could just hit it once.

I picked up four or five big rocks and walked clumsily toward the church kind of juggling the stones in my arms. I dropped the rocks at my feet and picked one up. I was crying and I couldn't see very well. My balance wasn't right either. At any rate, the rock went over the roof and hit the other side of the roof rolling down to the ground harmlessly and almost without a sound.

I felt so pathetic and angry I grabbed another rock with the arm that was really throbbing now. I turned around and saw Terry's grave lit up real eerily in the highbeams of my car. I saw the little girl's teddy bear staring blankly at me. My eyes caught the white hole in the sky above the cottonwoods.

If I could only stone the moon, I thought. It would be like breaking through a pasteboard mask to the other side. Like I was going through a wall or something that kept us from the answers to all our troubles and all our questions: Why is there a little notch between our nose and upper lip? Can we be good and happy? Why do children suffer and die? What purpose is there in Terry's death? What am I going to do the rest of my life or tomorrow? Does anything we do on this little speck of a planet make any difference?

But throwing stones at the moon is all I had been doing for nearly two years. It's all anyone around me had been doing. No one will ever hit the moon, and if they did, it makes no difference.

So instead of stoning the moon, I needed to do something. I knew what I had to do. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I let the stone drop out of my hand and like a domino it shook the other stones on the ground.

It was enough. I started walking back down the hill. I had no prayers to offer, and there was nothing I could do to bring him back. The lights of the car dimmed as the engine turned over, and I thought for a moment that it wouldn't start. It growled weakly and finally roared, and I backed quickly across the lot, spinning gravel in my haste. The car lights flashed on the church windows as I bumped and swerved onto the highway. I threw the car into forward gear and nearly floored the pedal. The old Nova swooned down the road. All the way home, it was Terry this and Terry that, tears streaking down my face.

My parents were in bed when I got home. I watched Johnny Carson for a while, but his humor seemed pretty lame. He kept winking at the audience to get their sympathy, and it worked. The lamer he was, the more they like him, as if the whole point of entertainment was to show your vulnerability.

I turned off the TV and went to bed. My room was the last one on the right, across from my grandmother's. When I got to the door, I could see her lying sadly in bed, and a wave of guilt went over me. I'd forgotten to say hello to her earlier, and Dad had probably told her I was home.

The night light was on. Her bed was in the corner. As I got closer, she startled me by turning her milky blue eyes in my direction. She had been awake all along, listening to the house, its aches and movements. I kissed her cool cheek and held her bony hand with its slim, crooked fingers. She couldn't talk anymore, due to the stroke, and she could only see me in pieces, but she was aware of everything. She knew how I was feeling just by holding my hand. There was irony in that, because much of what I thought and said was offensive to her. She was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. My parents had never told her I was a conscientious objector, because she thought the war was good, in spite of the church's position.

Tonight, however, there were none of these differences. I held her hand, and pictures of things ran through my body. I saw old photograghs of her and Grandpa, after whom I was named, standing in front of their ancient farmhouse, constructed of fieldstone. I saw him lying dead on the shady, slanting lawn of the same home a few years later, having died in his forties while working on the farm. It was only a few minutes after his death. His face was gray and his cheeks were strangely sunken for so young a man.

I kissed Grandmother good night again and went to bed in my old room with its high school memorabilia and musty country smell. Someone had left the window open to air out the room, and the cool breeze felt good. I lay on sheets so fresh they were scratchy, listening to dogs bark on neighboring farms. The extended arm of an old trophy, about to loft its basketball, could be seen in outline against the window.